Volume 26, Number 3 · March 8, 1979
F. W. Dupee 1904–1979
By Mary McCarthy
Jaunty, wry, rueful. Flash of kingfisher blue eyes. Edmund Wilson liked to say there was something French about him. A person of courage and irony. Much self-irony. Voice ironical with a sort of slide in it. Wrote particularly well about elegant, dandyish writers—James, Nabokov, Malraux—if anyone as elephantine as James can be thought of as a dandy or fop. He himself had a quality of elegance, but mixed, very appealingly, with innocence, the Joliet, Illinois, of his youth. Though he had the normal quota of parents, there was a sense of the orphan about him—he and his sister as two orphans in the big wide world. Was always like the boyish hero of a Bildungsroman.
Feature, 385 words
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